Adobe Confirms Plan To Sell AI-Generated Stock Images

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more and more commonplace, new companies are starting to embrace it in unexpected ways. Generative art is on the rise, with tools like DALL-E going viral almost every week. Some of these image generators opt for a more artistic approach, while some are trying to be realistic (and often end up horrifying as a result). Such art, whether it was pretty or not, was not considered appropriate for many things in the past. However, Adobe might be about to change that.

In the past few years, we've seen an increase in free-to-use AI tools on the internet. Nvidia made a text-to-image tool, but it's not as viral as the aforementioned DALL-E mini, which created and supported a lot of memes. NightCafe and StarryAI are two AI tools that create images that are so good that they could be made by actual artists. It's not just images that can be assisted by artificial intelligence now — OpenAI has a new chatbot called ChatGPT that sounds surprisingly lifelike.

Many companies and artists view artificial intelligence as a threat, which is why AI-generated images are banned from some stock photo websites. However, Adobe seems to be taking an entirely different approach.

Adobe has announced that instead of shunning artificial intelligence, it's going to be among the first to embrace it in an unexpected way — by adding it to Adobe Stock. While this was previously not an option, from now on, artists will be allowed to add images created by AI. The only caveat is that they must be labeled as such, so artists will not be able to claim they drew the image themselves.

In the announcement, Adobe emphasized the fact that it wants artificial intelligence to complement human artists and not replace them. This is a valid concern for many people in the art community — as AI art grows better and faster, fewer people may appreciate, and appropriately price, the creativity of human artists. However, Adobe makes its stance on the matter rather clear by saying: "Adobe is committed to helping lead the evolution that will come from this technology into tools that empower artists, while never seeking to replace human imagination."

Becoming part of the Adobe Stock photo repository is a big step for AI-generated content. There might come a time in the future when a lot of the imagery we see online is supported by artificial intelligence, if not made entirely by it, so it's going to be interesting to see how popular the AI images will be on Adobe Stock, and whether the company will have to face any legal troubles because of the unclear copyright laws.